In the summer of 1874, a student named Adolf Baumgartner walked into the university library in Basel and signed his name against a book that most of Europe had already decided to forget. The book was Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own, published in Leipzig in 1844 and then buried under three decades of polite German silence. It argued that the individual owes nothing to God, to the state, to humanity as an abstraction, or to any cause that asks him to make himself small. It was the kind of book that got a man’s name struck from respectable conversation. Baumgartner was borrowing it, by his own account, on the warmest recommendation of his professor. 
That professor was Friedrich Nietzsche, then a young philologist teaching classical texts at the University of Basel, years before he became the name we now attach to hammers and tightropes and the death of God. He was in his early thirties. He was already sick often, already restless inside the academy, already reading far past the edges of what he was paid to teach. And he was, quietly, pointing at least one of his students toward a book that argued the self was the only ground a person had to stand on.
Basel in the 1870s was a Protestant city on the Rhine, orderly and prosperous, a place where the university sat close to the churches and the professors were expected to reinforce both. Switzerland was neutral, comfortable, unhurried. It was not a place that advertised its radicals. But universities are leaky things, and the library register was a public record of what people were actually reading behind the lecture-hall decorum. Somewhere in that register sat Stirner’s book, checked out three times across an entire decade, each signature a small piece of evidence that the buried argument was not as dead as the culture pretended.
We know this because a French scholar went looking. Albert Lévy, a teacher of German at the Lycée de Toulouse, presented a thesis to the Faculty of Letters at the University of Paris in 1904, titled Stirner et Nietzsche. Lévy was trying to settle a question that had begun to trail Nietzsche’s reputation after his collapse and death: had he taken his most incendiary ideas from Stirner, an all-but-forgotten Young Hegelian whose one great book had sunk without a trace? It was a live and slightly scandalous question. Nietzsche had by then become an intellectual event, and Stirner was the ghost at the edge of the party, the man who seemed to have said some of it first.
Lévy did the unglamorous thing. He went to Basel and read the register.
What he found is precise and small and stubborn. Stirner’s book was borrowed three times between 1870 and 1880. In 1872 a privat-dozent named Schwarzkopf took it out. In 1879 a professor, Hans Heussler, took it out. And in 1874, between them, the student Baumgartner signed for it. Nietzsche’s own name appears nowhere on the list. He never borrowed the book himself, or at least never under his own signature.
So Lévy went to the people. He tracked down Baumgartner, who by 1904 was himself a professor at the University of Basel, a grown man with a career, being asked about a book he had read as a young student three decades earlier. Baumgartner remembered. He said he had read Stirner on Nietzsche’s advice. And he added a detail that has kept historians honest ever since: he was certain he had never loaned the book to his teacher. Nietzsche recommended it. Nietzsche did not, as far as Baumgartner knew, need to borrow it from him to read it.
This is the shape of the thing, and it matters that the shape is exactly this and no larger. Baumgartner was not a random name in a ledger. Nietzsche called him his Erzschüler, his arch-pupil, in his letters. Baumgartner came from a family already woven into Nietzsche’s world; his mother, Marie Baumgartner, translated Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations into French. This was a household inside the philosopher’s circle, and the son of that household went to the library and read the most dangerous individualist tract of the century because the professor he loved most told him to.
There is corroboration, which is rare for a story this old and this quiet. Franz Overbeck, the theologian who was Nietzsche’s closest friend in Basel and who stayed loyal to him through the collapse and the long dying, confirmed what Baumgartner claimed. Overbeck knew the date. The fourteenth of July, 1874. Baumgartner had borrowed Stirner’s book, and he had done it, in his own words, on Nietzsche’s warmest recommendation. Two men, decades apart, remembering the same small act.
Now hold what that act actually is, because everything interesting lives in the modesty of it. A professor in a respectable Swiss university, teaching Greek and Latin to the sons of the Protestant bourgeoisie, took a book the culture had agreed to bury and handed it forward to a student. Not in a manifesto. Not in a lecture printed and circulated. In a recommendation, one person to another, the way ideas have always actually traveled when the institutions carrying them would rather they didn’t. The library owned the book. The register recorded the loan. But the thing that moved was a sentence spoken between a teacher and a student, and no register can hold that.
The book itself is the reason this is not a footnote. The Ego and Its Own is one of the founding texts of individualist anarchism, the argument taken to its most unsparing edge: that every cause outside the self, God, nation, humanity, morality, the Revolution, is a “spook,” a phantom that people are taught to serve and sacrifice to. Stirner wanted the individual to reclaim everything the abstractions had confiscated. The book frightened people. It was answered furiously by Marx and Engels, who spent hundreds of pages of The German Ideology trying to bury “Saint Max,” which is one way of admitting he had gotten under their skin. Then it went quiet for decades. And then a young professor in Basel, reading everything, found it, and passed it to his arch-pupil.
You can visit Stirner now, in a manner of speaking. He lies in Berlin, and the Max Stirner Grave is a place people still go, this man who died poor and mostly forgotten in 1856, stung twice by bees on his neck, his one great book already sliding out of print. He would not have known that a professor two decades after his death would keep the argument alive by whispering it to a student across a Swiss lecture hall. He would not have known the argument was durable enough to be whispered at all.
The debate Lévy walked into was never really settled, and the honest thing is to leave it unsettled. Did Stirner shape Nietzsche? Some scholars have argued for direct influence, even quiet plagiarism. Others, then and now, have argued Nietzsche arrived at his ground independently and Stirner is a coincidence of the age, two men pulling at the same loose thread in German thought. Lévy himself was careful. He could prove the recommendation. He could not prove the mind. The register gives you a date and a signature and nothing about what happened inside a man’s reading. Baumgartner’s memory gives you a sentence spoken, not a debt owed.
What the record does show is smaller and, in its way, more useful than the influence question. It shows that ideas the culture believes it has successfully buried are rarely as buried as the burial suggests. A book goes out of print. Its author dies unread. The respectable consensus moves on. And the whole time, in a public library in a quiet Protestant city, the book is sitting on a shelf, and a professor knows exactly where it is, and he is telling his best student to go and read it. The forgetting is never total. Someone always keeps the location in their head.
This is the practical work that reading rooms and lending libraries have always done, and still do. A radical library is not a monument. It is a mechanism for keeping the buried book findable, for putting it in a hand that will pass it to the next hand. The register in Basel was doing that without meaning to. The people who run radical libraries now do it on purpose. The Bhopal Anarchist Reading Group in India, the Catut Anarchist Library in Salatiga, the Blood Fruit Library in Chicago, these are the same act made deliberate: a place where the dangerous book stays available and where someone can tell you, quietly and warmly, that you should read it.
Baumgartner signed for Stirner on the fourteenth of July, 1874, and then he went home and read it, and then he grew up and became a professor himself, and thirty years later a stranger from Toulouse knocked on his memory and he handed the story forward one more time. The book that Europe agreed to forget was never actually forgotten. It was on loan. It has been on loan ever since, and the terms are simple: read it, and tell someone where to find it.
If you want the wider ground this argument grew in, ARG has taken apart the myths around anarchism here: Anarchism: Beyond the Myth of Chaos and Violence.